Anti-Empire

After coping with serious illness over the past year, I have accepted the frustration and pain of having to put parts of my life on hold. I have gotten significantly better in the last couple of months and particularly the last few weeks. I will soon return to my thesis. I am well enough now to visit my sister who is town from Boston this week - something that I could not do in a real way a few months ago. I am well enough to read and write again. I have recovered the core of my existence.

Everything has looked brighter recently and I have been filled with hope. My frustrations surrounding my limited ability to participate in life as fully as I would like have been tempered with the knowledge that, in time, I will be able to more fully re-engage with living.

Organizing an emergency protest in solidarity with the people who have been illegally treated and detained by the police at the G20 summit is not something that can wait. And, I simply do not have the physical capacity to do this. I can tell you that of all the things I have endured in the past year, incapacity at this time is one of the most heartbreaking and angering of the experiences. Moving along through a paced recovery, I occupy myself with many mindless diversions. Yesterday and today, I feel I am failing as an activist, a comrade and a human being.

All I can do is attempt to assist in disseminating some of the reports from people on the ground. All I can do is thank my comrades and tell you that I am reduced to sobbing as it eats at my soul to not be able to physically stand in solidarity with you.

I will continue to distribute information on this blog, on my Tumblr account and on Twitter - @joannecostello. If I can help anyone in any socially mediated way, please contact me.

I am using this space to post a report that I found at The DominionMedia Co-op -- and excellent source for grassroots coverage of the events.

WE ARE CALLING AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. IN THE
MEANTIME, DISTRIBUTE THIS LINK AS WIDELY AS POSSIBLE.

We (i.e., Justin Giovannetti and Lex Gill) are both able and
willing to testify in front of a court of law, tribunal or hearing to
attest to the validity of these statements. Much of this is now recorded
on video and we have some contact information for the victims. We will
NOT consent to contact with any police representatives (municipal,
provincial, or federal) nor will we consent to speaking to other
security agencies (CSIS, Canadian Forces, etc.). We can be contacted at
lex.gill [at] gmail [dot] com, or jackgiovannetti [at] gmail [dot] com.

We just got back to our computers and are frantically writing this
message. It is 4:45 a.m. on Monday morning. We are the only people who
seem to know the extent of this story. Coffee and adrenaline keeping us
going. When we got to Queen and Spadina after leaving the Convergence
Centre raid today, we had already been blocked off by police lines. It
was pouring rain, and we could hear a confrontation taking place further
down the street. The cops didn't care whether or not we were media --
in fact, we heard that media was forced to leave before we arrived.
Police acted violently and with sheer disregard for the law, attacking
peaceful protesters and civilians unrelated to the protest. Tired,
frantic, and feeling defeated, we came home and posted the message
before this one.

We then did the only thing left to do, and headed to 629 Eastern
Avenue (the G20 Detention Centre, a converted film studio), where
detainees from the demonstrations were being taken. We knew people were
being released sporadically so we grabbed as many juice boxes and
granola bars as we could afford and set off with medical supplies.
Journalists were basically absent, showed up only to take a few seconds
of video, or simply arrived far too late to be effective.

It is next to impossible to set the scene of what happened at the
Detention Centre. Between the two of us we estimate that we spoke to
over 120 people, most of whom were released between 9:30 p.m. and 4:30
a.m. Despite not knowing each other, the story they tell is the same. It
goes like this. Most were arrested at three locations: the Novotel on
Saturday evening where the police arrested hundreds of peaceful
protesters (look @spaikan on Twitter); Spadina/Queen's Park all day
Saturday and early Sunday, as people were arrested all over the downtown
for many different (and often bogus) reasons; and the University of
Toronto, where hundreds of Quebecers and others were woken up and
arrested at gun point early Saturday morning.

What follows is a list, as detailed as we can make it in a blog post,
of what we saw and heard.

People were held for up to 35 hours with a single meal. None
seemed to have received food more than twice daily, the meal they did
receive was a hamburger bun with processed cheese and margarine
described as a centimeter thick. Detainees had to create loud noises for
hours to receive any food at all. All reported feeling more ill and
dehydrated after eating than before. Some vomited and received no
medical attention when they did. Water was not provided with the meal.

Inadequate water, as little as an ounce every 12 hours.
Although some people reported receiving approximately an ounce (a small
Dixie cup) of water every three hours, most seemed to have received
far less than that. They had to create loud noises and continuously
demand water, only to receive it up to an hour and a half later.
Sometimes rooms with over a dozen people were only given a handful
(four or five) cups of water and forced to share. Some reported the
water as yellow-coloured and smelling of urine, which they didn't
drink.

Facilities over-capacity.There were many reports of "cages"
filled with 40 people, though a police officer told one detainee that
they were intended for groups of no more than 15 to 20. Each cage had a
single bench, with only enough seating for five people. There was only
one toilet in each cage and it was without a door. Women were creating
barriers with their bodies for others to create some semblance of
privacy.

Major delays in processing.Many detainees were told that the
only reason they remained at the Centre was due to unexplained delays
in processing. Most detainees seemed to go through a three step system
whereby they were put in an initial holding cell, only to be moved to a
second cell after meeting a Staff Sergeant in a board room. This is
where they were told what they were arrested for. Eventually they were
moved to a third cell before release. This process seemed to take no
less than 10 hours. Others were never told why they were arrested and
never signed any documents. A few were released immediately upon
arriving at the Centre and were never processed. Some were never brought
to a cell, only made to wait in a line to be let out.

Inconsistent charges. Groups arrested at the same time and
for the same behaviour were given different charges, with some let out
and others given court dates. Many felt the police simply assigned a
charge or did not know why they were being arrested. Some charges were
changed or dropped before the detainees were released.

People put in solitary confinement. Most of the openly queer
detainees reported to have been transferred to a "Segregated Zone." In
cages built for one, couples of men and women were held. A lesbian is
reported to have spent nearly 10 hours alone. Another woman said she was
kept alone in a large cell for hours, asking to be moved the whole
time.

No pillows or mattresses to sleep. No bedding was ever
provided for detainees, who were told to sleep on bare concrete floors.
Detainees were stripped of all but a single shirt and legwear. Many
said they could not sleep during their day long detentions.

Unsanitary and unsafe living conditions. Many of the floors
of the cages were covered with dirt and the residue from green
paintballs used to identify suspects in crowds. Vomit was also on the
floor and no cleaning of the cages took place.

Police intimidation of released detainees. With many of the
detainees released and standing across the street from the detention
centre, getting food and water from community volunteers while waiting
for friends, police stood menacingly across the road. Almost all the
detainees were frightened by the police presence and feared an attack.
The police used the headlights of rental Dodge Caravans to light up the
crowd, citing a need to "keep them visible."

Non-stop light exposure/loss of natural light rhythm/sensory
deprivation. Detainees emerged with a broken day/night cycle, being
deprived of all connection to the outside world or any other time-based
events (ie. set eating times). While in their cages, detainees were
subject to constant light.Exposure to extreme cold.Detainees
complained of the air conditioning in the building being very high.
Many of them said that they were frozen and asked for blankets, a
request which was always refused. Due to having only a single layer of
shirt and sleeping on concrete floors, the cages were extremely cold.

Sexual harassment of women and Queer people. We heard many
first-hand accounts of cat-calls and crude sexual comments directed at
women from police officers at the Centre. Some women faced inappropriate
sexual contact (including one girl who was forced to endure a police
officer covering her body with detainee number stickers in order to
touch her), and rough handling from police officers. Openly Queer boys
were told to "straighten up," and there was at least one completely nude
strip search preformed on a young woman with no reasonable
explanation. It is unclear whether the strip searches that took place
were consistently conducted by members of the same gender. It is also
unclear as to whether any Transpeople, if detained, were put in cells
of a gender of their own determination or in cells of a police gender
assignment.

Youth as young as 15 in adult cells. Youth (under 18)
detainees were held in the same cells as adults, some of whom had not
been charged at all (and thus it could not be justified that they were
being held on adult charges). A 16-year-old was held in an adult cell
for at least 12 hours, the police were fully aware of his age, and his
parents were at no point contacted.

Denial of legal counsel. When detainees asked to see lawyers
they were told that they would receive legal counsel at a later time or
at the time of processing. Often, these times went by and no legal
counsel was provided. Those released without charge were told to avoid
contacting lawyers. Most detainees said they were never informed of
their rights.

No phone call. About only one in ten of the detainees we
spoke to had been given access to a phone. Others were promised access
at a later time and never received it. There was a father waiting
outside for his 20-year old son who had been arrested Saturday
afternoon or evening, and had yet to receive a call. Many of the
detainees were told that only 20 phones were available in the building,
holding over 500 detainees at the time. The offices of legal counsel
also had no landlines.

Belonging stolen/damaged.Most detainees reported that at
least some of their confiscated belongings were not returned to them,
including passports, wallets, credit and debit cards, money, cellphones
and clothing. When detainees were escorted outside the Centre, many
were made to walk on the street without access to their shoes (sealed
in thick plastic bags only returned at the limit of the Centre's
property). Some shoes were missing entirely. At least one extremely
visually impaired detainee's glasses were put with his belongings and
were severely damaged when he recovered them (ie. broken in half).

Threats of assault/harassment.Many detainees, but especially
French Canadian detainees (who were not served in French), were taunted
and threatened with assault. Homophobic slurs were used by guards and
one was told that if he was ever seen again in Toronto the cop would
attack him. Other degrading comments were made, including telling
detainees that they "looked like dogs."

Obviously illegal civilian arrests. Some civilians who were
completely uninvolved in the demonstrations were arrested while exiting
subway stations in the downtown core. Some were arrested after illegal
searches of cars turned up "dangerous goods" (like books about activism
and lemon juice). One fully-uniformed TTC streetcar driver was
arrested for hours. He had been ordered out of his streetcar by riot
police and was immediately arrested. We wish we were kidding.

No access to medication or medical treatment. While doing
medical support, Lex met at least two people who had been denied
medication. The first was a woman who said that she was pre-diabetic
and needed medication for nausea and dizziness. She was denied access
to medical treatment, despite the fact that by the time Lex found her
she was extremely faint, barely conscious, and had difficulty sitting
up. The second was a young man who was prescribed anti-psychotics and
had missed several doses (he did not, however, have an episode at the
time Lex met him). We heard stories of at least one person with Type 2
diabetes inside the Centre who had been deprived of insulin and fell
unconscious. Many stories of a man handcuffed to a wheelchair, missing a
leg (and his prosthetic) came from the released detainees. One
recently-released detainee had four extremely poorly done stitches on
his chin and was uncertain as to what shots (whether tetanus or
anesthetic, or both) he was given. He was given the stitches at the
time of his arrest and the wound was still bleeding badly (we had to
sterilize it and applied gauze).

AbandonmentDespite all of the above mentioned crimes against
detainees, most notably including medical issues, the Toronto Police
had no plan for the detainees after they were released. They were
simply escorted off the property and told to leave. Many had no idea
where they were, had no access to a phone, had not eaten in a day, had
no identification or money on their person, and were nowhere near mass
transit. Had community volunteers and fellow released detainees not
been present to assist them, we fear that some could have faced
life-threatening medical emergencies or death.

We will be continually updating this blog over the next few weeks.
Please share this with everyone you possibly can. People must know what
has happened in Toronto. For those of you attending the Jail Solidarity
rally tomorrow, please distribute this link widely.

Watching the news coverage of the current situation in Haiti is overwhelming. I feel very helpless, as I'm sure many do, and yet I take the seemingly insufficient step of donating online. When I consider the historical and current oppression of this region, I shut off emotionally because I know I am implicated in the tragedy...The only place to begin is with the seemingly insufficient steps of further educating myself and speaking out in the spirit of solidarity. So, I begin...

In his article Haiti, "Classquakes," and American Empire, Paul Stree writes that geographer Kenneth Hewitt coined the phrase "classquake" to describe 20th century earthquakes' differentiated pattern of destruction which fell mainly on slums and poor rural villages.

I have selected some excerpts on the article, but encourage you to read it in its entirety.

The earthquake catastrophe in Haiti is being portrayed on the national and local evening news as a natural disaster that has elicited a virtuous humanitarian response from the inherently noble and benevolent United States.

It’s about bad geologic (and cosmic, as in “acts of God”) forces versus good Uncle Sam, that fine democratic friend of the poor and downtrodden around the world.

“This is an opportunity,” the editors of The New York Times arrogantly proclaim today, “for President Obama to demonstrate how the United States shoulders its responsibilities and mobilizes other countries to do their part” (NYT, January 14, 2010, A28).

But Haiti’s agony and the role of the U.S. is much more complicated than the childish morality play being broadcast on the Telescreens.Earthquakes are natural developments, but vulnerability to them is richly anthropogenic (“man made”) and is not spread evenly across the fractured and intersecting global landscapes of race, class, and empire. As Mike Davis pointed out in his 2006 book Planet of Slums, a chilling expose of the atrocious living (and dying) conditions that US.-led neoliberal capitalism has imposed on the ever more mega-urbanized poor of the global South: ”Even more than landslides and floods, earthquakes make precise audits of the urban housing crisis…seismic destruction usually maps with uncanny accuracy to poor-quality brick, mud, or concrete residential housing...Seismic hazard is the fine print in the devil’s bargain of informal housing…”

The “relaxation” of regulations on housing planning and construction combines with the concentration of much of the South’s urban population “on or near active tectonic plate margins” to put millions in peril.

“Seismic risk is so unevenly distributed in most cities,” Davis learned, that one leading “hazard geographer” (Kenneth Hewitt) coined the phrase “classquake” to describe 20th century earthquakes’ “biased pattern of destruction,” which fell mainly on “slums, tenement districts, [and] poor rural villages.”

Davis’ (and Hewitt’s) analysis clearly applies to the current Haitian tragedy, vastly magnified by the desperately impoverished and informal, unregulated housing conditions of masses of marginalized people in and around the sprawling slums of Port au Prince. In that city’s most notorious slum, Cite-Soliel, David noted, population densities are “comparable to cattle feedlots” crowding more residents per acre into low-rise housing than there were in famous congested tenement districts such as the Lower East Side in the 1900s or in contemporary highrise cores such as central Tokyo and Manhattan.” [1]

...

The hyper-concentration of poor Haitians in seismically hyper-vulnerable subs-standard housing in and around Port au-Prince, it is worth noting, is a direct outcome of U.S. trade policies that undermined Haitian small farmers, sending rural residents into and around the capital city.

A reformist priest named Jan Baptiste Aristide threatened Washington’s vicious neoliberal regime when he won Haiti’s first free election in 1990. Aristide came to office with strong support from the poor majority. His hostility to U.S.-imposed misery led Washington to move to undermine his regime from the outset. Aristide was removed in a U.S.-supported coup in 1991 but returned amidst popular upheaval in 1994. The Clinton White House initially backed the coup regime even more strongly than did George Bush I. Thanks to its rhetoric about “democracy” at home and abroad, the militantly corporate-neoliberal NAFTA-promoting Clinton administration felt compelled to pretend that they backed Aristide’s return to power in 1994. The Clinton Pentagon and State Department delayed that return for two years and made it clear that Aristide’s restoration to nominal power depended upon him promising not to help the poor by offering any further challenges to Washington’s “free market” economics. “By 1994,” Chomsky explained last year, “Clinton decided that the population was sufficiently intimidated, and he sent US forces to restore the elected president – that’s now called a humanitarian intervention – but on very strict conditions, namely that the president had to accept a very harsh neoliberal regime, in particular, no protection for the economy.” [4]

In February 2004, the U.S. and France – Haiti’s traditional sadistic masters – joined hands (along with Canada) across their supposed great cultural divide to support another military coup. This U.S.-directed putsch exported Aristide to Central Africa.

...

Under the Woodrow Wilson-fan Barack Obama, as under George Bush II, Washington has banned Aristide from revisiting region. Obama sided with the corrupt Haitian elite by refusing to act against the shutting out of Aristide’s popular party (Family Lavalas) from Haitian elections in the spring of 2009. [6]

Washington has responded to the heavily racial-ized imperial “classquake” with Pentagon military “assessments” while China, Venezuela, and Cuba have acted promptly with direct humanitarian assistance and human solidarity. Look for the imperial masters to seek “disaster capitalist” (Naomi Klein) opportunities in the terrible tragedy in Haiti, which has been suffering the shocks and aftershocks of world capitalist empire since the end of the 15th century.

I have lived in Calgary for my whole life...I have always struggled with the Conservative culture, but it is rare that it overwhelms and shocks me. I feel incredibly sad that The University of Calgary would honor Condoleezza Rice by inviting her to be the keynote speaker at the opening of its new school of public policy. This is ugly. This is wrong. How can the deaths of so many innocent people be called "good policy"? I feel like I am in Wonderland; Dr. Mintz's words are nonsensical. How do these people fool their minds and hearts that pillage of other lands for resources is good in any way?

How can The University of Calgary support this decision? How is it that a graduate student like myself has to go through all sorts of hoops to get a small study approved by an ethics board, but Dr. Mintz is supported in his invitation of someone who has behaved unethically and harmed millions? Is there any such thing as academic integrity or are things like ethics boards just part of an empty process to pretend that we are doing everything OK? I hope not. I hope that University of Calgary students and faculty will resist and protest this decision with the support of members in local and international communities.

Petition to Dr. Harvey Weingarten, President of The University of Calgary:

The University of Calgary has announced that it has invited former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to be the keynote speaker at the opening gala of its new school of public policy. The director of the public policy school, Dr. John Mintz, celebrates Dr. Rice as “a good example of what a school of public policy can achieve.”

We, the undersigned, are a group of academics, activists and concerned persons who stand with global human rights organizations and the International Criminal Court to condemn the atrocities that were committed under the Bush administration's Iraq invasion and occupation. The evidence is overwhelming that Dr. Rice was a principal participant in the planning and propaganda efforts of an aggressive occupational war waged in violation of international law.

Multiple estimates indicate that over 1.2 million Iraqi people have died as a result of the war. According to the United Nations High Commission on Refugees, over 4 million Iraqis have been displaced from their homes. The invasion and occupation of Iraq has devastated the lives of people across America. Along with those who have lost family and friends, all suffer from the trillions of dollars spent on an illegal war, which is now resulting in drastic budget cuts to fundamental domestic policy sectors, infrastructure, and essential services.

The outcomes of Dr. Rice’s policies should be held up and identified as an example of the horrors that result when policy is made at the service of the military industrial complex, oil cartels, and geopolitical gain. These policies should not be honored at an institution of higher learning. Dr Rice's participation will not only undermine the credible standing of the new school of public policy, but tarnish the reputation of the University of Calgary as a whole.

We, the undersigned, strongly urge The University of Calgary to rescind its invitation to Dr Rice to open its new school of public policy. To do otherwise sanctions and celebrates violations of international laws, including illegal war causing the deaths of millions.

...still writing papers so blogging is still sub-par to the less-than-interesting-anyways entries that I dish out these days. Oh well.

I recently updated my Facebook status to:

1. Get to the doctor. 2. Finish
last paper of this freakin' degree. 3. Suck it up and write the
petition against U of C hosting Condi Rice. 4. Resume data collection
and finish my thesis. 5. Become a vigilante.

To which, I was able to offer the following response: "You would not be taunting me, if you saw me get in a fight in the
blood infusion room last week. Some guys were saying that the
non-Western world needs to realize that it will continue to get its 'ass whooped' and then went on to suggest that we privatize health
care. I spoke up...One started swearing at me. I was very close to
pulling out myIV and stabbing him with it. If there weren't sick people around (besides us), he would have been a dead man. But, yes, I suppose the same 'ol, same 'ol, average vigilante does not make priority lists."

What I didn't mention in this Facebook exchange is that I HAVE pulled out my IV before. Last fall, I was stuck in emergency for close to a day (which eventually ended up to be a series of days) and I was waiting over two hours for the nurse to remove my IV, so I finally decided to take it out myself. I learned quickly that there is a very good reason to get the cotton dressing over the injection site AS SOON AS the IV is removed. Otherwise, a LOT of blood gushes from your vein. Fortunately, I was heavily medicated and managed to find a bunch of cotton dressing and the bleeding stopped with about five minutes of applied pressure. After I cleaned the blood off of the floor, one could hardly tell that an "incident" had occurred.

The nurse was so unaware or jaded from her Third-World-like working conditions - yay, Alberta health care system - that she either did not realize or care that I removed my own IV.

Anyway, when I returned home that night and lay in bed super ill, I suddenly began to get paranoid about how IVs work. I kept thinking: "How come there was no needle to pull out? Where is the needle? Is it still in my arm? Oh my God, they will be so angry if I have to go back and admit what I did. OK, wait, the needle just gets the IV in...Is that right?"

Fortunately, I found a website that night for nurses which had a discussion topic on tips for removing IVs. (Yes, it is scary that these nurses are not getting the tips from senior nurses on the job!)

I was relieved to realize that the needle itself is only used to insert the plastic tube. So, for all of you who have always wanted to know how IVs work, there you go - mystery solved.

Mmm...OK...hopefully this final paper will be a little more captivating than this so-called blog entry. Over-and-out.

Bono is making poverty history. Iraq is being liberated. Someone is saving the whales. China is a human rights violator. Oprah is saving an entire continent. Hugo Chavez is a terrorist. All the people on Entertainment Tonight are giving back...

...except for Sean Penn. Writing about his recent trip to Cuba and Venezuela, Penn lists among his motivations: "to deepen my understanding of Chávez and
Venezuela and excite my writing hand."

Huh?

In his recent article for The Nation, Penn opens by saying:

Soon to be Vice President-elect Joe Biden was rallying the troops: "We
can no longer be energy dependent on Saudi Arabia or a Venezuelan
dictator." Well, I know what Saudi Arabia is. But having been to
Venezuela in 2006, touring slums, mixing with the wealthy opposition and
spending days and hours at its president's side, I wondered, without
wondering, to whom Senator Biden was referring. Hugo Chávez
Frías is the democratically elected president of Venezuela (and
by democratically elected I mean that he has repeatedly stood before the
voters in internationally sanctioned elections and won large majorities,
in a system that, despite flaws and irregularities, has allowed his
opponents to defeat him and win office, both in a countrywide referendum
last year and in regional elections in November). And Biden's words were
the kind of rhetoric that had recently led us into a life-losing and
monetarily costly war, which, while toppling a shmuck in Iraq, had also
toppled the most dynamic principles upon which the United States was
founded, enhanced recruitment for Al Qaeda and deconstructed the US
military.

By now, October 2008, I had digested my earlier visits to Venezuela and
Cuba and time spent with Chávez and Fidel Castro. I had grown
increasingly intolerant of the propaganda. Though Chávez himself
has a penchant for rhetoric, never has it been a cause for war. In hopes
of demythologizing this "dictator," I decided to pay him another visit.
By this time I had come to say to friends in private, "It's true,
Chávez may not be a good man. But he may well be a great one."

I could write a blog post about bloodcell phonesand conflict in the Congo. And, I could tell you how I have never owned a cell phone and that would be the truth. And, I could tell you that I don't own a cell phone because I am a socially conscious consumer (problematic phrase?) and that would be a lie. (I am just an introvert and can't imagine paying money to communicate everywhere-and-anywhere!)

I could and will tell you that I shop at Old Navy, the Gap, and Banana Republic.

I throw Enloe's classic Bananas, Bases, and Beaches back on the bookshelf and walk the aisles for clothes from a corporation that more or less explicitly celebrates garments that are the product of militarization, structural adjustment, and neocolonialism.

How do I live with myself?

I don't know...anxiously, sleepily, angrily, hysterically...occasionally hopefully...I guess like I imagine others live in this world.

The higher I climb the educational ladder, the more it hits me that I have to look outside the classroom - indeed, outside of academia - for the answers.

Howard Zinn shares his own process of conscientization in an essay titled 'Empire or Humanity? What the Classroom Didn't Teach Me About the American Empire'. Read the essay or enjoy the video clip below narrated by Viggo Mortensen and illustrated by Mike Konopacki.

With an occupying army waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan, with military bases and corporatebullying in every part of the world, there is hardly a question any more of the existence of an American Empire. Indeed, the once fervent denials have turned into a boastful, unashamed embrace of the idea.

However the very idea that the United States was an empire did not occur to me until after I finished my work as a bombardier with the Eighth Air Force in the Second World War, and came home. Even as I began to have second thoughts about the purity of the "Good War," even after being horrified by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even after rethinking my own bombing of towns in Europe, I still did not put all that together in the context of an American "Empire."

I was conscious, like everyone, of the British Empire and the other imperial powers of Europe, but the United States was not seen in the same way. When, after the war, I went to college under the G.I. Bill of Rights and took courses in U.S. history, I usually found a chapter in the history texts called "The Age of Imperialism." It invariably referred to the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the conquest of the Philippines that followed. It seemed that American imperialism lasted only a relatively few years. There was no overarching view of U.S. expansion that might lead to the idea of a more far-ranging empire -- or period -- of "imperialism."

I recall the classroom map (labeled "Western Expansion") which presented the march across the continent as a natural, almost biological phenomenon. That huge acquisition of land called "The Louisiana Purchase" hinted at nothing but vacant land acquired. There was no sense that this territory had been occupied by hundreds of Indian tribes which would have to be annihilated or forced from their homes -- what we now call "ethnic cleansing" -- so that whites could settle the land, and later railroads could crisscross it, presaging "civilization" and its brutal discontents.

Neither the discussions of "Jacksonian democracy" in history courses, nor the popular book by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Age of Jackson, told me about the "Trail of Tears," the deadly forced march of "the five civilized tribes" westward from Georgia and Alabama across the Mississippi, leaving 4,000 dead in their wake. No treatment of the Civil War mentioned the Sand Creek massacre of hundreds of Indian villagers in Colorado just as "emancipation" was proclaimed for black people by Lincoln's administration.

That classroom map also had a section to the south and west labeled "Mexican Cession." This was a handy euphemism for the aggressive war against Mexico in 1846 in which the United States seized half of that country's land, giving us California and the great Southwest. The term "Manifest Destiny," used at that time, soon of course became more universal. On the eve of the Spanish-American War in 1898, the Washington Post saw beyond Cuba: "We are face to face with a strange destiny. The taste of Empire is in the mouth of the people even as the taste of blood in the jungle."

The violent march across the continent, and even the invasion of Cuba, appeared to be within a natural sphere of U.S. interest. After all, hadn't the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 declared the Western Hemisphere to be under our protection? But with hardly a pause after Cuba came the invasion of the Philippines, halfway around the world. The word "imperialism" now seemed a fitting one for U.S. actions. Indeed, that long, cruel war -- treated quickly and superficially in the history books -- gave rise to an Anti-Imperialist League, in which William James and Mark Twain were leading figures. But this was not something I learned in university either.

The "Sole Superpower" Comes into View

Reading outside the classroom, however, I began to fit the pieces of history into a larger mosaic. What at first had seemed like a purely passive foreign policy in the decade leading up to the First World War now appeared as a succession of violent interventions: the seizure of the Panama Canal zone from Colombia, a naval bombardment of the Mexican coast, the dispatch of the Marines to almost every country in Central America, occupying armies sent to Haiti and the Dominican Republic. As the much-decorated General Smedley Butler, who participated in many of those interventions, wrote later: "I was an errand boy for Wall Street."

At the very time I was learning this history -- the years after World War II -- the United States was becoming not just another imperial power, but the world's leading superpower. Determined to maintain and expand its monopoly on nuclear weapons, it was taking over remote islands in the Pacific, forcing the inhabitants to leave, and turning the islands into deadly playgrounds for more atomic tests.

In his memoir, No Place to Hide, Dr. David Bradley, who monitored radiation in those tests, described what was left behind as the testing teams went home: "[R]adioactivity, contamination, the wrecked island of Bikini and its sad-eyed patient exiles." The tests in the Pacific were followed, over the years, by more tests in the deserts of Utah and Nevada, more than a thousand tests in all.

When the war in Korea began in 1950, I was still studying history as a graduate student at Columbia University. Nothing in my classes prepared me to understand American policy in Asia. But I was reading I. F. Stone's Weekly. Stone was among the very few journalists who questioned the official justification for sending an army to Korea. It seemed clear to me then that it was not the invasion of South Korea by the North that prompted U.S. intervention, but the desire of the United States to have a firm foothold on the continent of Asia, especially now that the Communists were in power in China.

Years later, as the covert intervention in Vietnam grew into a massive and brutal military operation, the imperial designs of the United States became yet clearer to me. In 1967, I wrote a little book called Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal. By that time I was heavily involved in the movement against the war.

When I read the hundreds of pages of the Pentagon Papers entrusted to me by Daniel Ellsberg, what jumped out at me were the secret memos from the National Security Council. Explaining the U.S. interest in Southeast Asia, they spoke bluntly of the country's motives as a quest for "tin, rubber, oil."

Neither the desertions of soldiers in the Mexican War, nor the draft riots of the Civil War, not the anti-imperialist groups at the turn of the century, nor the strong opposition to World War I -- indeed no antiwar movement in the history of the nation reached the scale of the opposition to the war in Vietnam. At least part of that opposition rested on an understanding that more than Vietnam was at stake, that the brutal war in that tiny country was part of a grander imperial design.

Various interventions following the U.S. defeat in Vietnam seemed to reflect the desperate need of the still-reigning superpower -- even after the fall of its powerful rival, the Soviet Union -- to establish its dominance everywhere. Hence the invasion of Grenada in 1982, the bombing assault on Panama in 1989, the first Gulf war of 1991. Was George Bush Sr. heartsick over Saddam Hussein's seizure of Kuwait, or was he using that event as an opportunity to move U.S. power firmly into the coveted oil region of the Middle East? Given the history of the United States, given its obsession with Middle Eastern oil dating from Franklin Roosevelt's 1945 deal with King Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia, and the CIA's overthrow of the democratic Mossadeq government in Iran in 1953, it is not hard to decide that question.

Justifying Empire

The ruthless attacks of September 11th (as the official 9/11 Commission acknowledged) derived from fierce hatred of U.S. expansion in the Middle East and elsewhere. Even before that event, the Defense Department acknowledged, according to Chalmers Johnson's book The Sorrows of Empire, the existence of more than 700 American military bases outside of the United States.

Since that date, with the initiation of a "war on terrorism," many more bases have been established or expanded: in Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, the desert of Qatar, the Gulf of Oman, the Horn of Africa, and wherever else a compliant nation could be bribed or coerced.

When I was bombing cities in Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and France in the Second World War, the moral justification was so simple and clear as to be beyond discussion: We were saving the world from the evil of fascism. I was therefore startled to hear from a gunner on another crew -- what we had in common was that we both read books -- that he considered this "an imperialist war." Both sides, he said, were motivated by ambitions of control and conquest. We argued without resolving the issue. Ironically, tragically, not long after our discussion, this fellow was shot down and killed on a mission.

In wars, there is always a difference between the motives of the soldiers and the motives of the political leaders who send them into battle. My motive, like that of so many, was innocent of imperial ambition. It was to help defeat fascism and create a more decent world, free of aggression, militarism, and racism.

The motive of the U.S. establishment, understood by the aerial gunner I knew, was of a different nature. It was described early in 1941 by Henry Luce, multi-millionaire owner of Time, Life, and Fortune magazines, as the coming of "The American Century." The time had arrived, he said, for the United States "to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit, and by such means as we see fit."

We can hardly ask for a more candid, blunter declaration of imperial design. It has been echoed in recent years by the intellectual handmaidens of the Bush administration, but with assurances that the motive of this "influence" is benign, that the "purposes" -- whether in Luce's formulation or more recent ones -- are noble, that this is an "imperialism lite." As George Bush said in his second inaugural address: "Spreading liberty around the world… is the calling of our time." The New York Times called that speech "striking for its idealism."

The American Empire has always been a bipartisan project -- Democrats and Republicans have taken turns extending it, extolling it, justifying it. President Woodrow Wilson told graduates of the Naval Academy in 1914 (the year he bombarded Mexico) that the U.S. used "her navy and her army... as the instruments of civilization, not as the instruments of aggression." And Bill Clinton, in 1992, told West Point graduates: "The values you learned here… will be able to spread throughout the country and throughout the world."

For the people of the United States, and indeed for people all over the world, those claims sooner or later are revealed to be false. The rhetoric, often persuasive on first hearing, soon becomes overwhelmed by horrors that can no longer be concealed: the bloody corpses of Iraq, the torn limbs of American GIs, the millions of families driven from their homes -- in the Middle East and in the Mississippi Delta.

Have not the justifications for empire, embedded in our culture, assaulting our good sense -- that war is necessary for security, that expansion is fundamental to civilization -- begun to lose their hold on our minds? Have we reached a point in history where we are ready to embrace a new way of living in the world, expanding not our military power, but our humanity?

Here's a fair trade: The US can take NAFTA back and, in return, people will share equally in oil resources.

Gordon Laxer, of the Parkland Institute, lights the way:

Bitten by the deal that once fed us
Canadians should hope for an Obama presidency and the reopening
of NAFTA

The Globe and MailJune 23, 2008

John McCain's visit to Canada on
Friday was a preview of just how important the issue of renegotiating the North
American free-trade agreement will be in this fall's U.S. presidential election.
The prospect of a Barack Obama presidency has sparked a lot of "will he or won't
he" worry in Canada. You can feel the fear of the business-as-usual crowd trying
to reassure themselves that Mr. Obama won't really reopen NAFTA.

He now says he won't unilaterally withdraw, and that his rhetoric got a
little overheated, but Mr. Obama still promises to open up a dialogue on NAFTA.
Instead of wringing hands and holding on to the past, Canada should seize the
opportunity that renegotiation could bring.

If Mr. Obama wins in November and brings his issues - labour and environment
standards - to the table, Canada should prepare its own list. At the top should
be getting out of the "energy proportionality" straitjacket that mandates that
Canada must offer a majority of its oil and gas to the United States, even if
Canadians freeze in the dark. Proportionality is "unique in all of the world's
treaties," writes Richard Heinberg, a noted California author on energy. In no
other developed country are citizens denied first access to their own resources.
"Canada has every reason to repudiate the proportionality clause," Mr. Heinberg
continues, "unilaterally and immediately."

Why did Canada agree to proportionality and why is it a bad idea now?

Canada entered the Canada-U.S. free-trade agreement and NAFTA 15 or 20 years
ago under very different circumstances. Then, it was widely believed that the
world had plenty of cheap oil, and there were no limits to ever-increasing
energy consumption. Few had heard of the catastrophe of climate change.
Pre-Sept. 11, security of energy supplies was on few people's minds.

In the early 1990s, it appeared to make sense for Canada to get virtually
guaranteed access to U.S. energy markets and, in return, to give the United
States first call on the majority of our seemingly limitless reserves of oil and
gas.

None of those assumptions now hold. Elsewhere, governments are making plans
to drastically cut greenhouse gases, meet the challenge of very expensive
gasoline and natural gas, and are preparing for the sudden shut off of fossil
fuels.

But, not Canada. The business as usual crowd, led by Stephen Harper's
government and the oil transnationals, seems to expect our carbon-burning
society to carry on as before.

We can't. Canada has only 9.3 years left of proven supplies of natural gas at
current rates of production. Yet Canada must make 60 per cent of it available
for export by NAFTA's proportionality clause.

Albertans are in for a shock. Despite faith in the province's endless
resource reserves, Alberta has only 8.1 years left of remaining established
supplies of natural gas.

Yet, Alberta recklessly exports half its natural gas, and uses an increasing
amount to produce tar-sands oil. Three quarters is exported to the United
States.

The Alberta Gas Resources Preservation Act, first enacted in 1949, is
supposed to provide security of supply for Albertans of 15 years before
natural-gas removals are permitted from the province. It keeps narrowing its
definition of which Albertans it will protect. Alberta doesn't enforce its own
laws. With less than 10 years of proven supply, Canada is running out of
conventional oil.

The tar sands have much oil. But they cannot be produced with as low a carbon
footprint as conventional oil. A seemingly unstoppable momentum is gathering in
the United States to not buy dirty tar-sands oil. If Mr. Obama becomes
president, he would likely shut the borders to it.

So, although Canada has lots of oil, we will increasingly be unable to use
most of it. That means stretching out the lifespan of conventional oil by ending
exports and seriously cutting domestic consumption. The alternative of
increasing imports from unstable OPEC countries is irresponsible. Thus, Canada
can no longer afford to export its remaining supplies of deliverable oil.

We should take the opportunity offered by the prospect of an Obama presidency
and exit from NAFTA's proportional, mandatory-exporting clause. It may have made
sense when we signed it. It doesn't now.

And if you expect Mr. Obama to back off on renegotiating NAFTA as president,
think again.

Ohio decided the 2004 presidential election and may do so again this year.
His need to win over the white working-class voters in Ohio, who strongly backed
Hillary Clinton during the Democratic Party primary and who oppose NAFTA, will
likely propel Mr. Obama to renew his pledge this fall.

What had been a fairly minor American story became much louder as Canadian
officials tried to scare the Democratic presidential hopefuls into backing off
their pledges to reopen NAFTA.

David Emerson, then Canada's Trade Minister, warned that "If you open it
[NAFTA] for one or two issues, you cannot avoid reopening it across a range of
issues." He added that "Americans' privileged access to Canada's massive oil and
gas reserves could be disrupted."

By saying that NAFTA gave the United States a sweet deal on Canadian energy,
Mr. Emerson raised the question of whether Canada got a raw deal. By trying to
browbeat American politicians into not reopening NAFTA, the Conservatives put
renegotiating NAFTA's energy clauses right where it should be - on our
agenda.

Canadians should welcome an Obama presidency. It may force us to embrace the
future, by regaining control over our own energy.

In the meantime, the Canadian elites try to bully anyone who dares re-open NAFTA. They refuse to depart from their golden fantasyland and their party (The CONLibs) has successfully introduced new legislation that firmly pushes neocolonialism to new heights in Canada. Indeed, they need more temporary workers, from the most desperate of countries, to continue the dirty work of dismantling our environment and our future so that Canada Inc. can continue to live it up!

It is time for international solidarity among citizens and workers. It is time to trade in bullshit policies for true participatory democracy. It is also time for long-term planning that takes generations as its time frame and not the nanosecond impulse of 21st century capitalism.

And, mon dieu, it is time to kick the CONLibs to the curb. We hope you enjoyed the party; now, it's last call. Your good time is up.

The boom in Alberta's oil industry is intimately connected to the imperial project in Iraq. The Alberta tar sands are known as the United States' "security blanket". While the United States invaded Iraq at least in part to secure oil, the blowback from the disastrous decision has forced the U.S. to find "the 'security' it was looking for right next door" (Klein, 2007).

So, while the U.S. seeks to support its energy needs and fund its ongoing imperial project, the Alberta landscape is being torn up; the community exposed to pollutants and possible fallout from the use of nuclear power,...the people who are the casualties of the US empire (Mexicans, Filipinos, etc.) are torn from families and used as cheap disposable labour under the TFWP; Albertans face displacement as CEOs and executives move in and colonize cities, turning rental units into condos...and all Albertans experience the strain of the boom as the government opens the door to capital without thought for infrastructure, health care and community needs...

So, it is time to extend our talks beyond the environment and ask why the tar sands are being developed?

I believe we must rally to STOP THE TAR SANDS. We must also stand up with a resounding NO to First World imperialism that draws on the casualties of its previous projects to perform the labour of the latest-and-greatest, while viciously pursuing more growth, more development and more profit based on the subordination of the majority of the world's people and the pillage of the planet.

An informative article from Yves Engler titled CIDA: foreign "aid" in name only?

A Senlis Council report released in August detailed the failure of Canadian programs supposedly aimed at alleviating poverty in Kandahar province. The mainstream media criticized the Canadian International
Development Agency's (CIDA) inability/unwillingness to successfully
distribute aid and even questioned Canada's justification for a military presence in Afghanistan

Months earlier, the media was abuzz over a report that called for the
abolition of CIDA because of its failure to alleviate poverty in Africa. On the surface this criticism seems reasonable. All government spending should be effective. But what if this focus on the effectiveness of aid to alleviate poverty narrows the parameters of the debate and excludes the real questions that should be asked?

For example, exactly who is “aid” designed to aid? Or, is “aid” always aid in the sense that ordinary people use the word?

To answer those questions perhaps we need to look at CIDA's 20-year-old
policy of pushing structural adjustment programs on African
governments. Rather than “aid” people this seems to have been a major
contributor to the continued impoverishment of the population. Or
perhaps we should discuss CIDA's role in liberalizing African mining
laws – to the benefit of Canadian corporations.

Researching a book on Canadian foreign policy, I have come across numerous examples
of Canadian “aid” that benefited the rich at the expense of the poor.

In the late 1980s, for example, millions in Canadian aid flowed to the elite in the Negros region of the Philippines who were blocking much-needed land reform, sometimes with paramilitary violence.

Canada has been one of the world's leading financiers of large hydro dams in the global south that have displaced indigenous and subsistence communities while major corporations (including Canadian engineering
firms) reap the benefits.

In Haiti the use of Canadian “aid” as a tool of class war is well established.
But you probably haven't read about it in the local paper; it's only
come to light through the work of the Canada Haiti Action Network.

The media has failed to tie the massive rise in “aid” to Haiti, which shot up from a few million to a hundred million dollars a year, to Canada's role in overthrowing the country's elected government headed by President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

For the first 15 months of the post-coup regime, the deputy justice
minister, Philipe Vixamar, was an employee of CIDA. His ministry was
responsible for hundreds of political prisoners and a brutal police
force. (The minister was an employee of USAID).

For the past three and a half years, the major recipient of Canadian aid
has been the Haitian National Police (HNP), which without an army is
the country's only armed force (aside, of course, from the 7000 UN
troops occupying the country). The salaries received by a hundred or so
Canadian police officers in Haiti are counted as part of Canada's aid contribution. A Quebec police commander working with the HNP told a University of Miami human rights investigation in November 2004 that he “engaged in daily guerilla war.” And the government's new counterinsurgency field manual cites Haiti as an example of Canadian counterinsurgency activities.

The primary role of Canadian police has been to train and assist the HNP.
This coincided with a brutal campaign of political repression waged by
the HNP against supporters of the overthrown government. According to The Lancet medical journal, in the 22 months after Aristide was toppled the HNP killed an estimated 1700 people in Port-au-Prince alone.
Last month, Le Devoir
quoted an unnamed official who said CIDA is spending $25 million to
create a police academy to train Haitian officers. The article failed
to mention the recent brutality of the HNP and their militarization
under Canada.

In the months following the coup, nearly all new police were former
military and, according to Reuters in March 2005, “Only one of the top
12 police commanders in the Port-au-Prince area does not have a military background, and most regional police chiefs are also ex-soldiers."

The current head of the police, Mario Andresol, who was appointed by the de
facto government, is a former military man who still wears his combat
garb. The new HNP (which the head of the UN wants to triple in number)
are responsible for all aspects of policing in the country, from beat
cops and border patrol to the SWAT team and palace security.

This concentration of the armed force command structure puts those in charge
in a better position to overthrow a government or exert political
influence in other ways.

As the media exalt Canada's role in building the HNP, they miss an important historical parallel dating back to 1918 when US forces established a Haitian army three years after invading. The US used this ‘Haitian’ military to maintain their 19-year occupation, and
once US troops left the country the army became a primary tool for the US
to retain power. Until its dissolution by the Aristide government in
1995, this army never fought a foreign power. Its sole use was to
repress the domestic population.

Immediately after that army was disbanded, the US tried to mold the newly created police force (the army had been responsible for policing activities). The US worked to militarize the police until the Haitian government finally expelled US police trainers and Washington responded by withholding aid.

Historically, the Haitian elite and their foreign backers have had near absolute
control over the country's armed forces. This control was weakened from
1995 to early 2004, which made it necessary for US marines and Canadian
forces to invade the country to overthrow Aristide — a process more
laborious than past coups, when the army simply killed or expelled the
head of state (with US support of course).

Since the February 2004 coup, tens of millions in Canadian “aid” dollars have
been spent to reestablish foreign and elite control over Haiti's
armed forces. Accomplished almost entirely under the radar of the
media, if this police force overthrows the next government attempting
to narrow Haiti's class divide, Canadian officials will be able to claim they had no role in the affair.